Wrap rage has an official name. That should tell you something.

Wrap rage is a real term. Real people in packaging research use it to describe what happens when a human attempts to open hard plastic clamshell packaging. It's in the dictionary. Consumer Reports has covered it. There are injury statistics. Injury statistics. For packaging.

You know the clamshell. Everyone knows the clamshell. Sealed plastic, heat-welded around its perimeter, impervious to bare hands, capable of defeating a determined adult armed with kitchen scissors. The contents become visible around minute three. Airborne around minute four.

I've been around awhile. I've been cut by clamshell packaging. Properly cut, the cursing-and-hunting-for-a-Band-Aid kind, more times than I can count. Often enough, over enough years, that I've forgotten what the products were. Think about that. The injuries were memorable. The products were not. Four decades of merchandise successfully liberated, and I couldn't name a single item. But I remember the Band-Aids.

Here's the thing: the clamshell is actually a success story. It solves two real problems brilliantly. Retail theft, you can't remove the product without visible evidence of tampering. And shipping damage: the rigid plastic absorbs everything the supply chain throws at it. Someone should get a bonus. Both problems, you'll notice, belong to the company. Neither belongs to you.

You are the person who encounters the product after all the company's problems have been solved. What remains is you, the scissors, and a rapidly diminishing sense of goodwill toward the brand whose name is embossed on the plastic that is currently winning. I've never once, upon finally extracting a product from a clamshell, felt warmly toward the company that made it. Relief, yes. The grim satisfaction of winning a fight I shouldn't have had to have. Brand affinity? No.

And the companies shipping clamshells are, by and large, the same companies running spots about how much they value their customers. Both things are true, in their way. The spots reflect what the company believes about itself. The packaging reflects what happens when that belief competes with operational convenience. Operational convenience wins. It usually does. Usually without anyone deciding it should.

— Gary Hopkins

Founder and principal of Method, a strategic marketing practice.